No matter what sector you are in, the main obstacles to successful onboarding are the same. New employees are looking for guidance, their place within the team, and the essential knowledge for getting started. If your industry has a high employee turnover, then you know how important it is to get this process right.

It’s a little disturbing, that according to famed analytics firm Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organisation does a good job of onboarding. That’s a lot of room for improvement! Here are our 5 essential tips to get your employees onboarded from day 1.

1 – Early training is the same for everyone – make it personal

To engage staff from the very beginning, and increase your chances of retaining them in the long term, You need to make your training personal from the start. In addition to a warm welcome and a team session, set them up on a mobile-first platform like MobieTrain straight away. It can help them to feel part of the organisation and allow them to start absorbing info between sessions and on-the-go. Furthermore, you can begin gathering data that will help you tailor their training over time.

2 – Onboarding is too short – make it ongoing

Remember that onboarding is ongoing: absorbing company values takes time and performing well requires practice. Vary your types of training by creating a blended learning strategy to maximise effectiveness: a face-to-face session where everyone meets, a crash course on MobieTrain to cover the essentials, a long-term learning path to develop an individual’s specific skills and strengths over time. HR experts say that giving newcomers a clear development path early on increases the chances of them staying on.

3 – Imparting too much info at once is useless – make it bite-sized

If you overload newbies with info on day 1, don’t be surprised if they have forgotten most of it by day 2. Our brains are not outfitted to take in huge amounts of information at once. Bite-sized pieces that can be built up over time and chunked together is much is much easier for our brains to handle. Your tech solution can be really helpful here. If you can space repetition of info out over time, at intervals that fit a learner’s individual pace, you can increase knowledge retention by up to 50%. That’s exactly what microlearning does.

4 – Onboarding is too generic – make it interesting

Regularly adding new training content keeps it fresh and allows employees to stay both up to speed and engaged. Tailor it to your company, so it reflects your culture, your values and even your colour scheme. MobieTrain allows you to do exactly that and do it up to 50% faster than normal e-learnings. You can also add gamified elements like quizzes, puzzles, videos and rewards to keep content fun and shareable amongst staff, motivating them to come back for more. Combine this with interactive in-person sessions that allow newbies to actively experience the company culture.

5 – Tech solutions are often overlooked – make sure it’s working

Mediocre onboarding can lose you talent and cost you money. Which is why you need to ask your teams for their input and keep managers involved throughout the whole process. Use your data insights to look back at staff adoption of materials. Monitor their progress over time and look forward at periodical reviews, setting actionable learning goals together.

Want to know more about using MobieTrain to improve onboarding in a fun and interactive way? Just ask!